The Basics Are Not Basic
On teaching Rotary that Your work is the Service
We call it Rotary Basics, and the name does the session no favors. I was privileged to be the keynote speaker of the “Bag-ong Sinugdanan: The Legacy of a Lasting Impact”- orientation for Rotary Club of Cebu Fuente
It sounds like housekeeping. The founding in Chicago in 1905, four men at a table. The Object of Rotary. The Four Way Test. The Avenues of Service. The Areas of Focus. Rotaract, born in 1968. Facts to be transferred, then filed.
But stand in front of fifty young people who have chosen to be there, and you realize very quickly that you are not delivering information. You are making an contention about how a life might be arranged. And they can tell the difference.
Four Questions and a Whole Ethic
Consider the Four Way Test. Rotarian Herbert J. Taylor (served as RI president, 1954-1955) wrote it in 1932 to save a failing company, and we have carried it ever since as though it were a slogan. Back in 1932, the Creditors of the Club Aluminum Company assigned him the task of saving the company from being closed out as a bankrupt organization.
It is not a slogan. It is four questions that will not let you off easily.
Is it the truth.
Is it fair to all concerned.
Will it build goodwill and better friendships.
Will it be beneficial to all concerned.
Notice what those questions refuse to do. They do not ask whether a thing is legal. They do not ask whether it is profitable, or whether you can defend it if challenged.
They ask about all concerned, which is to say about people who are not in the room and cannot argue for themselves.
Ask a twenty year old to apply that standard to the career they are about to enter and watch the room go quiet. They understand immediately that this is not a test they can pass once.
The Object Nobody Reads Aloud
The Object of Rotary is the least quoted and most radical thing we have, because of the claim buried inside it.
Rotary does not treat your work as the thing you do before you get to the service. Your work is the service, or it can be.
Read the Object slowly and you will find it there. It asks for the development of acquaintance as an opportunity for service. It asks for high ethical standards in business and the professions, and for the recognition of the worthiness of all useful occupations. It asks that the ideal of service be applied in personal, business and community life. And it asks for international understanding and peace through a world fellowship of people united in that ideal.
The lawyer, accountant, the teacher, the nurse, the engineer. Each occupation is a channel through which good either flows or fails to.
That is the idea I most wanted the young Rotaractors of the University of the Visayas to leave with. Not that they should volunteer on weekends. That the profession they are studying for is already a moral instrument, and they will spend a lifetime deciding what to do with it.
Why Rotaract Matters More Than We Admit
Rotaract began in 1968 as a Rotary programme for young people. In 2019 the Council on Legislation broadened the definition of membership in Rotary International to include Rotaract clubs. A year later, the policies governing Rotaract were moved out of the chapter marked Programs and into the chapter marked Clubs.
Rotaractors are still not called Rotarians, and the daily life of a Rotaract club did not change overnight. But that relocation of a few paragraphs in a rulebook is one of the more honest things Rotary has done in my lifetime. It was Rotary conceding a point it had been slow to concede. Young people are not preparing to serve. They are already serving, and the structure had to catch up.
Fifty of them sat in front of me that afternoon, part of nearly a hundred who had asked to join, and none of them were waiting for permission.
The First Room
I learned the shape of that afternoon long before I understood it.
At five years old I sat in the front row of the College of Law at that same university, watching my lawyer father teach. The law meant nothing to me. The room meant everything. I could see that he was not distributing knowledge but entrusting it, and that his students knew the difference.
Decades later I stood in the same institution with a different subject and the same task.
This is what the basics really are. Not a syllabus to be covered, but an inheritance to be handed carefully to people young enough to spend it well.
They were ready for it. They usually are.
Written and Submitted by: Dr. Maricel Borromeo-Amores, Past Asst. Governor| Past President -RCCF
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